In a medical setting, sensor devices physically attached to a patient are used to monitor the vital signs of a patient. Vital signs that are commonly monitored include blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, etc. Medical information obtained from these sensor devices is typically transferred to a patient monitor device, where the information can be processed and displayed.
Medical information transferred between devices typically contains large, high-integrity, highly-defined packets that require a certain level of processing. The packets are typically sent and received through several layers of buffers, each building around the previous. Some medical devices, for example handheld and wireless medical devices, have small processors and typically do not have the processing power required to do extensive packet processing.